How Sarvam AI Inspired Hoovu to Build HR Agent for Warehouse Workers

A recent trip to San Francisco left entrepreneur Rhea Karuturi with a simple observation. While Silicon Valley was abuzz with discussions around AI, many Indian companies were still figuring out how to use the technology.

Karuturi, who co-founded floral brand Hoovu with her sister Yeshoda, tells AIM that a series of talks by Sarvam AI co-founder and CEO Pratyush Kumar convinced her that India needed more builders experimenting with AI locally. At that time, she was exploring the idea of starting an AI venture in Silicon Valley.

“But after attending those talks, I felt that if I was going to build something, it should be in India,” she recalls.

Founded in 2019, Bengaluru-based Hoovu sells fresh puja flowers and devotional products through online and quick commerce channels. The startup gained national attention after appearing on Season 2 of Shark Tank India, where it secured ₹1 crore for 2% equity from Aman Gupta and Peyush Bansal at a ₹50 crore valuation. The company is profitable today.

After listening to Kumar, she started experimenting with Sarvam’s models and APIs. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, Karuturi turned a late-night prototype into a production-ready HR assistant for Hoovu’s warehouse workforce.

The result was Vanaja, an AI HR assistant that interacts with warehouse packing staff in regional languages and helps employees access information related to attendance and monthly pay. Powered by Sarvam’s Saarika v2.5 automatic speech recognition model and Bulbul v2 text-to-speech model, the assistant can converse with workers in their preferred language.

The assistant is named after one of Hoovu’s earliest employees, who passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack last year. “When I was building it at around 3 am, I thought it would be nice to name it after her,” Karuturi says.

Building AI for the Factory Floor

Hoovu employs around 150 women across warehouse operations in multiple cities. Unlike many enterprise AI tools built for office workers, Vanaja was created with frontline employees in mind.

“I think usually when people think of AI, they think of people like you and me, sitting at a desk with a laptop and a degree using it,” she says. “But seeing the people in my warehouse interact with it and be so excited was really cool.”

The AI assistant helps employees access salary information, ask HR-related questions, seek guidance on benefits and workplace issues, and share feedback. Human HR teams remain in the loop, stepping in whenever concerns or complaints need to be escalated.

According to Karuturi, the goal is not to replace HR staff but to extend their reach.

“With 150 ladies, they might have certain questions that they may not feel comfortable asking HR, or maybe they don’t have access to HR all the time because we’re in nine cities,” she explains.

The HR assistant is only one of several AI projects underway at Hoovu. The company has been using AI for warehouse planning, generating daily operational schedules, and helping teams respond to unexpected disruptions.

Why India Needs Its Own AI Ecosystem

The project received an unexpected push from the Sarvam team. After Karuturi shared an early version of the prototype online, Sarvam developer Sneha Prabhu reached out with suggestions to reduce latency and improve the experience.

“She gave me a few tips, and because of her encouragement, I worked on it a little bit more,” she recalls.

While Karuturi used Anthropic’s Claude to help build the application, she believes Indian AI companies such as Sarvam play an important role in the country’s technological future.

Her comments come at a time when geopolitics is increasingly shaping access to AI models. Anthropic recently withdrew Fable 5, a Mythos-class model for general use, following a US export-control directive issued on national security grounds. The company disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers, including foreign nationals inside and outside the United States, as well as foreign-national employees.

The development reinforced Karuturi’s belief that India must continue building its own AI capabilities while also adopting the best global technologies.

“India as a country should not be bargaining with an American company to be able to protect its most important companies,” she says, referring to the Indian government’s reported efforts to gain access to Anthropic Mythos. “That might be the reality of the present, but it should not be the future.”

She argues that India’s challenge is not just about building frontier models but ensuring AI reaches more people and businesses. While companies should use the best models available globally, the country must also invest in developing its own capabilities.

“And all my excitement about Claude and getting people to play with it—gone today! Why should we use a technology trying to lock us out? It’s like collecting pennies on the railroad tracks,” she posted on X.